The Negative Emotions In Sing,Unbuired,Sing

Sing,Unburied,Sing has made the African-American female writer Jesmyn Ward win National Book Award for a second time in 2017.This thesis probes into the characters’ negative emotions,using Sianne Ngai’s theory about negative emotions to analyze African-Americans’ negative emotions in the novel.According to Ngai’s theory,the negative emotions not only reveal their harsh predicaments but also stimulate their efforts or provide them with agency.The three different emotions,respectively “fear”,“jealousy” and “grief”,have revealed the continuation of slavery after the Reconstruction,the racial and sexual inequality after the Civil Rights Movement,and contemporary racism—the social difficulties African Americans are confronted with in the twentieth century and the twenty-first century.In addition,negative emotion promotes the African Americans to explore their way out,reflecting the efforts made by generations of African Americans to change their living status quo.This paper investigates the cause and effect of the three emotions to disclose the writer’s review on American history of racism and criticism on contemporary racism.This thesis is mainly divided into three parts: the introduction,the main part,and the conclusion.The main part of the thesis consists of three chapters.The first chapter digs deep into protagonist Jojo’s grandfather River Red’s fear and its historical cause.This chapter also discusses how the grandfather River managed to survive the continuation of slavery in fear.The second chapter analyzes the protagonist Jojo’s mother Leonie Red’s envy and its potential cause,phallocentrism and racial oppression,as well as how her envy devalues white supremacy and rebuilds familial bonding with her families.The third chapter’s discussion starts form the cause and the development of the protagonist Jojo’s grief and explains how Jojo’s grief and contemporary racism closely connects.It also reveals how Jojo’s blackness is enhanced and white Americans with conscience stand up to contemporary racism with the help of grief.The African American family’s stories are not narrated in chronological order,so their present and past negative emotions tend to intersect,which indicates that the ever-lasting racism in various forms keeps torturing African Americans.This thesis clarifies the causality between American social culture and African Americans’ negative emotions,reveling that the negative emotions play a significant role in African Americans’ pursuit of a better life.